Outbound contact campaigns exist over a variety of channels such as e-mail, facsimile, regular postal mail, telephonic communication, and the like. By and large, telephonic communication is still the most popular and widely preferred contact campaign channel used by businesses to reach consumers.
Typically, a selling business will identify a service or a product which it desires to market to consumers. Next, a market/business analyst will identify individuals which are believed to be likely candidates for purchasing the service or the product. The individual names and telephone numbers of these identified consumers are acquired from a variety of sources such as organizations external to the selling business which compile and sell large amounts of information about consumers, internal customer data stores controlled by the selling business, and the like.
Often analysts will mine a plurality of data stores using a variety of existing automated tools (e.g. NCR's Relationship Optimizer, and the like) in order to define appropriate profiles on potential purchasers and to correspondingly restrict the contact campaign to the potential purchasers matching the profiles. Some data stores consist of historical information gathered from past campaigns and historical customer information collected during past interactions of all types with the customer (like prior purchases, credit applications, service information, and others). However, this mining exercise only creates a target list of consumers whom will be contacted during the campaign, and it does not optimize the actual execution of the campaign.
After a campaign is identified and a contact list created, a variety of existing automated software packages permit the campaign to be automatically managed, placing calls to the target consumer and connecting the call (after the consumer answers) to the next available call center agent (also referred to as a customer service representative “CSR”). For example, the contact list can be electronically provided to Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) software packages (e.g. Genesys, Geotel, and the like) wherein a record for each contact is maintained electronically and logically hooked to a customer database where additional information about a contacted consumer may be acquired and provided to the CSR during the contact with the consumer.
Furthermore, these CTI packages may be interfaced to a variety of internal business Front Office Applications (FOA), such as Vantive, SilkNet, Siebel, ONYX, and Clarify. The FOA's permit modification to fields in the internal customer database, and electronic screens are popped up on a CSR display when a call is delivered to a CSR, providing additional information to the CSR about the contact. CTI's do not require CSR's to dial any telephone number, this is all handled by the package automatically.
It is well known by those skilled in the art that various environmental factors, such as time of day, time of week, current events, consumer obligations, and consumer activities, and the like will have a significant impact on whether or not a contacted consumer in the campaign will be receptive to the CSR's offered services and/or products. Yet, existing outbound contact campaigns do not provide methods or systems which enable the campaign execution system to select target customers who are likely to be receptive at the time the call is placed while traversing the contact list. Since, ideally the selected contact list is already optimized prior to the campaign with the appropriate consumers, it is desirable to continuously optimize the order in which the contact list is traversed during the campaign such that the consumers are contacted at appropriate times where their individual environmental factors are most favorable to permitting a successful CSR contact (e.g. a sale, a trial offer, and the like).
Moreover, by contacting consumers at a time which is conducive to their individual favorable environmental factors, the CSR does not waste his/her time talking to individuals predisposed to rejecting a telemarketing call and therefore more successes are recorded during the campaign. More successes translate into potentially more revenues for the selling business. A typical call center (e.g., 50 agents) may realize over $100,000 per year in savings by reducing each contact by 20 seconds, a savings typically realized by enabling a call center with CTI and FOA software. Increasing the number of customer contacts by one each hour, which achieves the business success for which the campaign was undertaken, typically improves the CSR's productive time by 6 minutes each hour. Therefore, as one skilled in the art will appreciate, the ability to only marginally increase the success rate of a campaign can have a significant impact on the selling business by increasing revenues while decreasing the expenses associated with CSR's.